In 2016 I applied for a job as “Education Adviser” on Tristan da Cunha. They never got back to me.
Back then it might have worked but I was only six months after the removal of a stage 3 colon cancer. So it was a bit unicorn jockey to apply. I reckon we would have made quite a difference to life on the island.
But now I cannot get a professional qualification from the Royal Society of Chemistry {RSC} or the Institute of Physics {IOP} because I have no recent work experience or any referees. My Ph.D. supervisor was for a while president of RSC.
In reality I will have forgotten a major part of what I once knew. There will be some eclectic things left. I am unqualified. My degrees are around forty years old. No person aged around 40 at the height of their powers would give me the time of day in a technology sense. Getting a high technology job aged 61 is probably completely impossible for me.
What you don’t use you lose.
That is a property of knowledge, if it is not used, practised and kept up to date, it quickly ossifies and turns to dust. Some of it might be salvageable, the bulk not.
I have personal experience of this. To rebuild a level held before is not easy. You also question it, question what you once held to be true and accurate. You no longer buy the proofs. When you are not trying to pass exams, you look at things differently and with more scepticism.
One could argue that knowledge dies out because there is no need for it, there is no call for it. It simply fades away as a natural process. Maybe it might be re-discovered again, maybe not. Knowledge can be age appropriate, who needs to navigate by the stars when we have GPS. In our age many of the arts and sciences of before no longer have a place. They die out and the Elves head off into the West as the time of man entrenches itself. There may be a bright flicker before the candle is finally extinguished. But when the time has come, it has come.
Now the Great God of science has slayed the dragon of many an illogical craft. With its arguments and its spreadsheets it has laid waste to the subtle and diaphanous. If there is not six sigma it must die at the end of the sharpened lance of reason, bleeding out in a puddle of severed arteries. The harsh neo-fascist architecture of enforced realism clothes the world in a grey digital desert of binary or hexadecimal sameness. Thank God we can now, at last, all become safe AI-clones marching to the tune of Nvidia driven bliss. Blessed be the high K dielectric!!
We are so wasteful. We discard so very much. If our immediacy is not sated we lose interest. If we cannot count it or graph it, it has no worth. If we cannot sell advertising of the back of it, bin it.
If the Delphic oracle of Google does not recommend it in examining the entrails of the internet, we will never hear of it again.
Maybe after I get my hip fixed I might inquire of Tristan da Cunha again. It is the kind of place where I might belong…
Dreamyoga 